Here is an all-too-familiar scenario for businesses such as retailers and restaurants that operate brick-and-mortar locations: you carefully plan a digital advertising campaign, say to promote a back-to-school sale . . . you’ve done your homework on your audience, and you’ve developed a killer keyword strategy . . . your campaign launches, creating a spike in traffic to your location pages, your listings on Yelp, and to your brick-and-mortar storefronts . . . resulting in angry customers. Why? Because your location data is wrong in search results or your content is out of date.
Faulty data and bad content can sabotage the best-laid digital advertising plans. And a recent Forrester study suggests that bad data is a big problem. Forrester surveyed digital marketers to understand their challenges delivering mobile ads. As reported in eMarketer, the survey respondents said that inaccurate location data is a big problem undermining their efforts.
I’m sure you’ve experienced the results of poorly managed location data when you Yelp or Google a store or restaurant after seeing an ad or hearing a social media conversation. A new restaurant offers specials to lure new customers! But, when you search for the location, its address is wrong (or perhaps nonexistent) and its hours are not posted. What happened in that situation is that the business forgot to prepare for the uptick of traffic to its location pages that would result from a well-executed ad. To avoid becoming one of those businesses, we recommend you get your organic house in order. Here are steps you should take now:
- Audit the state of our location data. Make sure all your locations have claimed Google My Business pages and are showing up in searches on search engines, Yelp, and all the places where people look for brick-and-mortar locations near them. Then review the accuracy of your location data, including elements such as your name, address, phone number, hours, and web URL (if your data appears on a third-party site), among other elements. If your business operates hundreds and thousands of locations, managing the accuracy of your data can be daunting task – so make sure you’ve assigned someone the job of doing so.
- Update your data as needed to reflect any seasonal or event-based information that will change temporarily. This issue is especially crucial during holiday seasons when retailers keep expanded hours. Before you promote a seasonal event, have you updated your listings to reflect the change? And after the event is over, did you update your store hours again? The need to constantly update data as in this example is one reason why businesses work with automated software platforms – there’s just too much heavy lifting involved.
- Make sure your deep content reflects the searches people are making as a result of the advertising you are running. We’ve talked about the need to align content with searches on blog posts such as Taylor Murphy’s post on adapting your pay-per-click strategies for voice search. Similarly, it’s important to be ready for an uptick in searches (voice and text-based) resulting from your advertising. If you are a retailer running a sale Star Wars merchandise this fall to coincide with the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, have you updated your online inventory to prominently feature this merchandise for people conducting these searches, especially on mobile devices?
By managing your data and content to prepare for a major digital advertising roll-out, you drive the right traffic to your online storefronts and brick-and-mortar locations – people who are responding to your call. Failing to get your data and content in order will create frustrated customers. The choice is yours. Contact True Interactive to discuss maximizing the value of your performance media. We’re happy to help.
Image source: New Old Stock (https://nos.twnsnd.co)
